


Family Business

by icaruslaughed



Series: Suptober20 [19]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Post Season 15
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:01:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27186949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icaruslaughed/pseuds/icaruslaughed
Summary: day 24 of suptober
Series: Suptober20 [19]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1955047
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	Family Business

Whiskey began to soak into the cuffs on his jeans, glass slicing his feet as he shuffled away from the ever growing puddle. He didn’t bother picking it up, didn’t even get up to clean the cuts oozing blood onto the already stained floor. Alcohol mixed with blood and burned his exposed flesh and it  _ hurt _ . Good. He deserved to hurt because he failed at his job. He wanted to hurt because it provided a distraction from his failure.

He sat there in a puddle of blood, glass, and whiskey for what could have been hours. Probably was hours: the hours he should have spent sleeping. He sat there, stewing in his guilt, until someone knocked on the door. Sam. Sam knocked on the door, because no one else was around to knock on the door. No one else had been left alive.

He meant to get up then, say hello to Sammy. A quick  _ Morning, how’d you sleep? I’m fine, I promise, I always am. How are you? _ all the while hiding the mess he made. The mess he  _ was _ . Instead he just kept sitting there, hardly even looking up in acknowledgement.

“Dean, you look like shit. What happe-“ Sam began, but there was no point in asking; they both knew what happened. “Did you even sleep?” Dean shook his head ever so slightly. It was enough, though. Sam hesitantly walked around the corner of his bed, wincing upon seeing the mess. “Oh god, Dean. Come on, let me clean this up.”

“S’fine, Sammy. I’ll deal with it later.”

“No, you won't! I know you: you’ll just stay here like this and you won’t even try to get better. You have to start dealing with this.  _ Actually _ dealing with it, not just drinking your problems away. Damnit Dean! I’m grieving too, but you can’t-“

“Don’t you  _ dare _ tell me what I can and can’t do! Do you know? Do you even know what…” Tears threatened to spill down his cheeks but he blinked to clear them away because he can’t cry in front of Sammy, because he’s grieving too, like he said, and he needed Dean to be strong for him. He needed his older brother. So Dean took a breath to brace himself for what he wanted to say next. “Do you even know how he died?” he whispered, “He died because I told him I loved him. I love him, Sammy, and he loved me, and it got him killed.”

Dean heard more than saw Sam carefully kneel next to him, away from the broken whiskey bottle that he dropped when it truly hit him that Cas was  _ gone _ , Cas was  _ dead _ , and he was never coming back. He felt an arm snake around his shoulder and hold him tight as he—when did he start to sob?—cried.

“It used to just be about saving people, hunting things, the family business,” he laughs bitterly. “More like getting people killed, hunting God, ‘disappointing the family’ business.”

“Don’t say that. We saved the world, yes we had to kill God but that’s just part of the job, and something tells me all that would make our old man proud.”

“Tell that to the ashes of our son and...and Cas.”


End file.
